Critical Reading: Nurturing Active
Reading.
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We embolden our students to ask critical questions of the text at hand and understand, from a young age, the power of words. Moving beyond passive reading and an unengaged approach to comprehension, we encourage our students to think outside of the box: who do you think narrated this text? What issues are at stake in what we have just read together? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this persuasive text?
Literature is at the core of our English programme as it aids in the cultural, intellectual, emotional and social awareness of our students and in turn, leads to a strong command of both the spoken and written English language. As a direct result of our Gifted Thinkers English tuition, our students can read complex texts with rigour and confidence.
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(Creative) Writing: for all purposes and audiences.
As an adult, we know that we would not write a letter to the council in the same tone that we would write an email to a personal acquaintance. For children, learning to write for the desired recipient of a text is a key learning curve in their literary development. Our students learn to write for a range of purposes and audiences and work on identifying these traits in the work of others.
In their Gifted Thinkers tuition sessions, students learn to write accurately, persuasively and with a plethora of literary techniques and vocabulary, suited to the genre of the text.
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Perfecting the language through which all other subjects are taught.
Our bespoke Gifted Thinkers tuition plans are delivered by a first-class English Literature graduate with a wealth of teaching expertise. In line with the National Curriculum, we provide specialised support on both English Literature and English Language and aid our students in becoming fluent readers, writers and verbal articulators. English Literature and English Language should be studied as an inseparable unit for the vast majority of a child’s schooling; we teach both of these components through to A Level.
As English is the language through which we digest our surroundings, we push our students to acquire a strong command of the English language, to understand syntax and semantics and expand their lexicon. A fully-fledged understanding of the English language is at the core of a child’s education and their command of English ultimately affects their work in other subject areas.
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Nurturing fluent readers, writers and articulators at Gifted Thinkers
Some examples of key content covered within a Gifted Thinkers English tuition session:
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Editing our own writing
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Grammatical knowledge: contractions, prepositions, conjunctions
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Identifying the verb, subject, object in a sentence
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Common nouns vs proper nouns
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Spotting mistakes in example sentences and being able to correct these
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Vocabulary expanding exercises
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Extensive comprehension exercises
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Creative Writing skills
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Synonyms, antonyms
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Using and Identifying Literary Devices: similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, puns
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Features of persuasive writing
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Features of journalistic writing
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Identifying adjectives: comparative adjectives, superlative adjectives
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Idioms
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Paraphrasing and summarising
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Pronouns including possessive and self-reflexive pronouns
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Active and passive voice
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Direct and reported speech
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Relative clauses
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Fronted adverbials
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Identifying the different aspects of a plot: conflict, rising action, resolution, climax
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Understanding genres of writing: non-fiction, fiction, fantasy etc
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Identifying dialogue and narrative in a text
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Vowel digraphs and split vowel digraphs
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Silent consonants
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Using punctuation effectively: full stops, exclamation marks, question marks, semicolons, colons, commas
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Interrogative sentences, declarative sentences, exclamatory sentences
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Homophones
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Contractions